In recent years, more and more companies are making their move towards CI/CD and applying it into their product development process. What is the significance of CI/CD implementation in software engineering? The answer to this question lies in the benefits it brings. To help you decide if CI/CD is the right step for your organization to take, then wrap your head around the 5 best benefits of continuous integration and delivery, and see how they can help in your development, testing, and deployment process.
1. Faster Release Rate
Failures are detected faster and as such, can be repaired faster, leading to increasing release rates. However, frequent releases are possible only if the code is developed in a continuously moving system.
CI/CD continuously merges codes and continuously deploys them to production after thorough testing, keeping the code in a release-ready state. It’s important to have as part of deployment a production environment set up that closely mimics that which end-users will ultimately be using. Containerization is a great method to test the code in a production environment to test only the area that will be affected by the release.
2. Smaller Backlog
Incorporating CI/CD into your organization’s development process reduces the number of non-critical defects in your backlog. These small defects are detected prior to production and fixed before being released to end-users.
The benefits of solving non-critical issues ahead-of-time are many. For example, your developers have more time to focus on larger problems or improving the system and your testers can focus less on small problems so they can find larger problems before being released. Another benefit (and perhaps the best one) is keeping your customers happy by preventing them from finding many errors in your product.
3. Faster MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution)
MTTR measures the maintainability of repairable features and sets the average time to repair a broken feature. Basically, it helps you track the amount of time spent to recover from a failure.
CI/CD reduces the MTTR because the code changes are smaller and fault isolations are easier to detect. One of the most important business risk assurances is to keep failures to a minimum and quickly recover from any failures that do happen. Application monitoring tools are a great way to find and fix failures while also logging the problems to notice trends faster.
4. Increase Team Transparency and Accountability
CI/CD is a great way to get continuous feedback from your own team. While CI is mostly focused on the development team, CI focuses more on getting the product quickly to the end-users. And both CI and CD provide rapid feedback, allowing you to steadily and continuously make your product better. This also helps increase the transparency of any problems in the team and encourages responsible accountability.
5. Reduce Costs
Test automation is a crucial component of any CI/CD pipeline. Using automation in the CI/CD pipeline helps reduce the number of errors that can take place in the many repetitive steps of CI and CD. It also helps free up developer’s time, enabling them to focus more on product development as there aren’t as many code changes to fix down the road if the error is caught quickly.
Want some more information about CI/CD? Check out this article to explore the benefits of CI/CD
Conclusion
Faster, better, more efficient, and less disruptive — this is what you’ll experience if you implement CI/CD. In short, a well-planned and well-executed CI/CD pipeline accelerates the release rate and reliability while mitigating the code changes and defects of your product. This will eventually result in much higher customer satisfaction.
Learn more: What is CI/CD?
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